An extraordinarily secret government blacklist just got a little bit less secret.

Seven American citizens who were banned by the government from air travelreceived word yesterday evening that they are cleared to fly. For them, the notice ends a years-long struggle to find out why they were blacklisted and clear their names. As of last night, the seven can finally make plans to visit family, travel for work, and take vacations abroad.

The seven – six men and one women – had been on the government No Fly List, which prevented them from flying to, from, and over U.S. airspace. Even after they were surrounded by TSA agents at the airport and questioned by the FBI, the government refused to officially confirm that they were included on the list. They were also never provided reasons for being banned from air travel, or given a meaningful opportunity to contest the ban. In short, our clients have been locked in a fight to regain their freedoms with virtually no information.

The notice that the seven are “not currently on the No Fly List” came after a federal court last week set deadlines for the government in the ACLU’s challenge to the No Fly List. The court ruled that the government must notify our clients of their status on or off the No Fly List, give reasons to those still on the list, and provide an opportunity for them to challenge those reasons. The first of those deadlines was yesterday, and the government must complete reconsideration of the remaining cases by January 16.

Yesterday’s milestone isn’t only significant for the seven American citizens who can finally resume their lives. It also makes clear to the six other clients in the case that they’re still banned from flying. And while that may not seem like good news, it’s the first time the government has confirmed – albeit through negative implication rather than a direct confirmation – that people are on the No Fly List. It’s also a very basic victory for due process, because under our Constitution, the government can’t watchlist people and deny them basic freedoms without then telling them they’re blacklisted and why.

Our client Abe Mashal had this response:

More than four years ago, I was denied boarding at an airport, surrounded by TSA agents, and questioned by the FBI. That day, many freedoms that I took for granted were robbed from me. I was never told why this happened, whether I was officially on the list, or what I could do to get my freedoms back. Now, I can resume working for clients who are beyond driving distance. I can attend weddings, graduations, and funerals that were too far away to reach by car or train. I can travel with my family to Hawaii, Jamaica, or anywhere else on vacation. Today, I learned I have my freedoms back.

Our clients have been living in limbo for years, without the ability to challenge a secretive government system that has dramatically curtailed their freedoms. While yesterday’s notice is long overdue and doesn’t make up for the burdens our clients have long endured, it is good news for the seven who can fly again. And the others look forward to finally receiving from the government its reason for watchlisting them, so they can correct errors or innuendo and clear their names.

For the first time ever, the unfair and unnecessary secrecy regime surrounding the No Fly List is beginning to crumble.

The government has committed to revamping the No Fly List redress process more broadly. We expect it to make good on its word and move quickly to give everyone else on the list the opportunity to clear their names.

In June 2010, the ACLU and its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California, and New Mexico filed a legal challenge on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents who cannot fly to or from the U.S. or over American airspace because they are on the government’s secretive No Fly List (an additional three people have since joined the suit). The plaintiffs, who include four U.S. military veterans, have never been told why they are on the list or given a reasonable opportunity to get off it. Being unable to fly has severely affected their lives, including their ability to be with their families, go to school, and travel for work. In August 2013, the court agreed with the ACLU that constitutional rights are at stake when the government puts Americans on the No Fly List. In the same ruling, the court asked the ACLU and the government to submit additional information about the No Fly List redress procedure to help the court decide whether the process as a whole violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. In June 2014, the court ruled the government’s system for challenging inclusion on the No Fly List is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on behalf of:

Ibraheim (Abe) Mashal, a U.S. citizen and veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, is a traveling dog trainer and father of three. He is unable to serve clients who are not within driving distance of his Illinois home because he is unable to board a plane.

Ayman Latif, a U.S. citizen and disabled Marine veteran.

Raymond Earl Knaeble, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran.

Steven Washburn, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Air Force veteran who was prevented from flying from Europe to the United States or Mexico; he eventually flew to Brazil, and from there to Mexico, where he was detained and finally escorted across the border by U.S. officials.

Abdullatif Muthanna andNagib Ali Ghaleb, two American citizens who were prevented from flying home to the United States after visiting family members in Yemen.

Faisal Nabin Kashem, Elias Mustafa Mohamed, and Mashaal Rana,three American citizens who were prevented from flying home to the United States after studying abroad in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye, a U.S. citizen and resident of Portland, Oregon who was prevented from flying to visit his daughter who was in high school in Dubai at the time.

Stephen Persaud, Amir Meshal, and Salah Ali Ahmed, three American citzens who were prevented from boarding domestic flights.

Several of our clients were stuck overseas, unable to return to their homes in the United States because they were on the No Fly List. In August 2010, the ACLU petitioned the court for preliminary relief so that the plaintiffs stranded abroad could fly back to the U.S. The government eventually let each of these plaintiffs return home. It also instituted a repatriation procedure by which U.S. citizens or green-card holders stranded outside of the United States due to apparent inclusion on the No Fly List can secure clearance to fly to the United States on an approved flight. Still, the government refused to tell our clients why they hadn’t been able to fly back in the first place or whether they would be able to fly in the future.

The lawsuit aims to remedy this failure. It was filed against officials at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Terrorist Screening Center, which creates and controls the No Fly List. In May 2011, the district court dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction, ruling that the lawsuit should have been filed against the Transportation Security Administration, and that the relief the plaintiffs sought could only come from a federal appellate court. The ACLU appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, unanimously reversed the district court’s decision and held that the case should go forward in district court, where it now proceeds.

In a motion for partial summary judgment, the ACLU asked the court to rule that the inadequate redress process for people on the list violates the Constitution’s guarantee of due process. The court partially granted that motion in August 2013, holding that the Constitution applies when the government bans Americans from air travel. Still pending is the court’s decision whether the redress procedures violate the Constitution’s due process guarantee.

In June 2014, the court struck down the redress process as unconstitutional, and it ordered the government to tell the ACLU’s clients why they are on the No Fly List and give them the opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the list before the court.

Until the government comes up with a new process, the No Fly List will consist of thousands of people who have been barred altogether from commercial air travel with no meaningful chance to clear their names, resulting in a vast and growing group of individuals whom the government deems too dangerous to fly but too harmless to arrest.

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Californians sue government after being placed on ‘Suspicious Activity’ watch list.

WHAT A JOKE! Right now, there are all kinds of illegals being bussed and flown all over the country BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY BORDER PATROL! In 2004, Julia Davis tried to stop known terrorists from entering the country, AND WAS PERSECUTED FOR IT. All these SAR reports are for is keeping control of us in our new STASI nation.

by STEVE WATSON | INFOWARS.COM | JULY 14, 2014

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Five Californians are fighting the Department of Justice in court over the fact that they have been entered into a terrorism database over entirely innocent activities such as taking photographs, buying a computer, and even waiting for relatives to arrive at a train station.

Court House News reports that the ACLU and the Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus are representing the plaintiffs, who have been entered into a “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SAR) database, and could remain on it for decades to come.

The database is part of a federal government program which encourages local and state law enforcement to report any “suspicious activity” they believe could be related to terrorism. The database is just one of many managed through the Department of Homeland Security’s controversial fusion centers.

According to a government report, over 35,000 names had been added to the database by 2013.

“An individual who is reported in a SAR is flagged as a person with a potential nexus to terrorism and automatically falls under law enforcement scrutiny which may include intrusive questioning by local or federal law enforcement agents.” the legal complaint notes.

“Even when the Federal Bureau of Investigation concludes that the person did not have any nexus to terrorism, a SAR can haunt that individual for decades, as SARs remain in federal databases for up to 30 years,” the complaint adds.

One of the plaintiffs, James Prigoff, an 86-year-old internationally renowned photographer of public art, has been on the database for a decade now, after he was “caught” taking pictures of a piece of modern art in Boston in 2004. When private security guards reported the incident to police, the FBI got involved, paying a visit to Prigoff’s house, and questioning his neighbors, according to the lawsuit.

Taking pictures of public landmarks, and taking pictures from public land is protected under the First Amendment to The Constitution.

“All I was doing was taking pictures in a public place, and now I’m apparently in a government terrorism database for decades,” Prigoff said in a statement issued by the ACLU.

“This is supposed to be a free country, where the government isn’t supposed to be tracking you if you’re not doing anything wrong. I lived through the McCarthy era, and I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy careers and lives. I am deeply troubled that the SAR program may be recreating that same climate of false accusation and fear today.”

Another of the men, lead plaintiff Wiley Gill, was entered onto the database because he was identified as a “Suspicious Male Subject in Possession of Flight Simulator Game,” by the Chico Police Department in 2012. The key fact that made Gill suspicious was that he converted to Islam while a student at a state university. Gill says that he does not own a flight simulator game, and was merely browsing a website about a video game on his computer at home. That’s correct, In America you can be entered into a terrorism database for looking at a video game website in your own home.

“The only reason that someone deemed Mr. Gill ‘suspicious’ is because he is a devout Muslim, not because he has done anything wrong,” Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus attorney Nasrina Bargzie said in a statement. “With such a lax standard, it’s not surprising that the result is religious profiling of this nature. Racial and religious profiling of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities needs to stop.”

Another of the plaintiffs was put on the terror database because he attempted to buy some computer equipment in bulk from Best Buy. The fact that Khaled Ibrahim, a U.S. citizen, is a computer network consultant didn’t matter – he has a Muslimy name, so whack him on there.

Another US citizen, Tariq Razak was placed on the terror database because he was “observed surveying entry/exit points” at the Santa Ana Train Depot. The report entered into the database describes Razak as a “Male of Middle Easter decent”, and says he was seen “exiting the facility with a female wearing a white burka head dress.” In reality he was picking up his mother from the train station. The report also referred to him as an “Arab”, despite the fact that he is of Pakistani descent. The report also contained the make, model and license plate number of Razak’s car. The security officer responsible for making the report claims that everything she did complied with the “terrorism training” she had received from the local police department’s terrorism liaison officers.

Other activities deemed to be potentially terroristic include “Abandoning a [hotel] room and leaving behind clothing, toiletries, or other items”; “Refusal of housekeeping services for extended periods”; and “Multiple visitors or deliveries to one individual or room.”

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office report on the SAR database, the program has failed to result in any arrests, convictions, or thwarted threats. ZERO. NADA.

What it has done, however, is create a sea of utter bullshit that government workers have to waste their time dealing with. In 2012, a Senate subcommittee found “‘dozens of problematic or useless’ reports ‘potentially violating civil liberties protections,’” according to the complaint.

“The Justice Department’s own rules say that there should be reasonable suspicion before creating a record on someone, but the government’s instructions to local police are that they should write up SARs even if there’s no valid reason to suspect a person of doing anything wrong,” ACLU staff attorney Linda Lye said in the statement.

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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Law enforcement agencies have long collected information about their routine interactions with members of the public. Sometimes called “field interrogation reports” or “stop and frisk” records, this documentation, on the one hand, provides a measure of accountability over police activity. But it also creates an opportunity for police to collect the personal data of innocent people and put it into criminal intelligence files with little or no evidence of wrongdoing. As police records increasingly become automated, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly seeking to mine this routine contact information and distribute it broadly, as if it is criminal intelligence information. With new intelligence sharing systems like fusion centers, Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Information Sharing Environment (ISE), information collected by local police in any city or small town in America can now quickly end up in federal intelligence databases.

SARs and the Reasonable Suspicion Standard. The Supreme Court established “reasonable suspicion” as the standard for police stops in Terry v. Ohio in 1968. This standard required suspicion supported by articulable facts suggesting criminal activity was afoot before a policeman could stop a person for investigative purposes. Likewise, the Department of Justice established a reasonable suspicion standard for the inclusion of personally identifiable information into criminal intelligence systems. Title 28, Part 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations states that law enforcement agencies receiving federal funds:

shall collect and maintain criminal intelligence information concerning an individual only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity [emphasis added].

SAR programs threaten this reasonable, time-tested law enforcement standard by encouraging the police and the public to report behaviors that do not give rise to reasonable suspicion of criminal or terrorist behavior.

In January 2008 the DNI ISE Program Manager published functional standards for state and local law enforcement officers to report ‘suspicious’ activities to fusion centers and to the federal intelligence community through the ISE. The behaviors it described as inherently suspicious included such innocuous activities as photography, acquisition of expertise, and eliciting information. The following March the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initiated its own SAR program to “gather, record, and analyze information of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism,” and included a list of 65 behaviors LAPD officers “shall” report, which included taking pictures or video footage, taking notes, drawing diagrams and espousing extreme views. In June 2008, long before either of these programs could be evaluated, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security teamed up with the Major City Chiefs Association to issue a report recommending expanding the SAR program to other U.S. cities. (Indeed, in April 2009 the LAPDadmitted its SAR program had not foiled any terrorist threats during its first year in operation.) The FBI began its own SAR collection program called eGuardian in 2008, and in 2010 the military announced it would implement a SAR program through eGuardian.

Criticism and Response. The ACLU released a report criticizing these SAR programs in July 2008. In response, ISE program manager Thomas E. McNamara and his office worked with the ACLU and other privacy and civil liberties groups, as well as the LAPD and other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, to revise the ISE SAR functional standard to address privacy and civil liberties concerns.

The revised ISE standard for suspicious activity reporting, issued in May 2009, indicates that a reasonable connection to terrorism or other criminal activity is required before law enforcement officers may collect Americans’ personal information and share it within the ISE. It includes language affirming that all constitutional standards applicable to ordinary criminal investigations, such as the Terry reasonable suspicion test for whether a law enforcement officer can stop and question an individual, also apply to officers conducting SAR inquiries (see page 7). The revised ISE functional standard also makes clear that behaviors such as photography and eliciting information are protected under the First Amendment, and require additional facts and circumstances giving reason to believe the behavior is related to crime or terrorism before reporting is appropriate (see page 29). These changes to the standard, which include reiterating that race, ethnicity and religion cannot be used as factors that create suspicion (see page 7 and 29), led us to believe that law enforcement would have the authority it needs while ensuring greater respect for individuals’ privacy and civil liberties. We applauded the willingness of the ISE Program Manager to engage constructively with the civil liberties community and to make modifications to the functional standard to address the concerns presented.

It has become clear, however, that the Program Manager does not interpret the Functional Standard consistently with its plain language, or with our understanding at the time the standard was issued that it required reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. In fact, the Program Manager has expressly acknowledged that the Functional Standard requires “less than the ‘reasonable suspicion’ standard.” See PM-ISE, Privacy, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Analysis and Recommendations–Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative at 12 (draft May 2010). That increases the likelihood that “intelligence” will be gathered about innocuous or constitutionally protected activity.

Competing Standards and Proliferation of Reports. The FBI has adopted a separate, even less stringent standard for suspicious activity reporting: “observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism, criminal or other illicit intention.” As is the case with the ISE Functional Standard, the FBI standard does not require reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. These competing standards not only have resulted in confusion over whether specific conduct meets the standard for suspicious activity reporting, but they also have too often led to inappropriate law enforcement contact with completely innocent Americans. These inappropriate contacts include stops and arrests based on nothing more than First Amendment-protected activities and the unwarranted collection of personally identifiable information. For example, a 2010 government evaluation of the ISE SAR program reveals that the Virginia Fusion Center processed 347 SARs, only 7 of which met the ISE SAR standard, while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement processed a whopping 5,727 SARs, with only 12 meeting the ISE SAR standard (see page 32).

Due to the disparity in the SAR programs across the country, law enforcement officers on the beat are still being encouraged to collect information about people engaged in commonplace behaviors. This overbroad reporting mandate is not just constitutionally questionable; it’s also counterproductive. These orders, if taken seriously by local law enforcement, can yield only one outcome: an ocean of data about innocent individuals that will overwhelm the investigative resources of the authorities. In attempting to put the intelligence community’s failure to pursue investigative leads regarding the attempted bombing of an airplane over Detroit on December 25, 2009 into context, National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Director Michael Leiter complained that the NCTC receives “literally thousands” of pieces of intelligence every day. Adding innocuous information about the everyday activities of Americans will only increase this burden on intelligence resources. The police should instead focus their efforts and resources by collecting information only where there is a reasonable factual basis for suspecting misconduct.

Rather than tightening SAR collection standards, however, many federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are expanding them by encouraging not just police but the general public to report suspicious activity. The FBI, DHS and the Colorado fusion center teamed to produce a fear-inducing video that describes photography, using binoculars and even soliciting donations for charity as precursors to terrorism. The Michigan State Police have a similar video, the LAPD has a program called iWatch, and the Arizona fusion center has a websiteencouraging the public to report these same behaviors, as do many other stateand local law enforcement agencies.

These programs are eerily similar to former Attorney General John Ashcroft’sTIPS program, which encouraged meter-readers and postmen to spy on their neighbors until Congress ended it in late 2002 due to civil liberties concerns. And these SAR programs don’t have the same limiting language—which has apparently been ignored—that was added to the ISE functional standard, making it even more likely that both the police and the public will continue over-reporting the commonplace behavior of their neighbors.

The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute published a survey of fusion center employees in September 2012, which characterized suspicious activity reports as “white noise” that impeded effective intelligence analysis.

Racial Disparities in Stop and Frisk Data. Adopting and maintaining a reasonable suspicion standard for law enforcement stops and for the collection, retention and dissemination of personally identifiable information is a necessary, though not a sufficient methodology for protecting the rights and privacy of innocent people. Oversight and effective enforcement of the standard are critical to ensuring law enforcement authorities are not abused. For instance, the New York Civil Liberties Union obtained “stop and frisk” data from the New York Police Department which revealed that almost nine out of ten of the nearly three million people it stopped since 2004 were non-white. And though the NYPD should have been using the reasonable suspicion standard required under Terry, only about 10 percent of those stopped by the NYPD actually received summonses or were arrested. Yet the NYPD collected and retained the personal information of the innocent people it stopped as well as the guilty. In effect, NYPD is creating a massive database of innocent people of color in New York City. Such racial disparities in stop and frisk data should be a warning to police departments implementing SAR programs.

SAR Abuse Focusing on Photography Photographers appear to be among the most frequent targets of SAR and SAR-like information collection efforts. Whether lawfully photographing scenic railroad stations, government-commissioned art displays outside federal buildings or national landmarks, citizens, artists and journalists have been systematically harassed or detained by federal, state, and local law enforcement. In some instances, the ensuing confrontation with police escalates to the point where the photographer is arrested and their photos erased or cameras confiscated with no reasonable indication that criminal activity is involved. A Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy eventhreatened to put a subway photographer on the Terrorist Watchlist.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had a light-hearted take on the story of a man arrested by Amtrak police for photographing an Amtrak train for an Amtrak photography contest, but illegal arrests of innocent Americans exercising their right to photograph in public (like this and this and this) are happening too often to be just a laughing matter. Congress held hearings into the harassment of photographers at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station and at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Several government agencies, including the New York Police Department (NYPD), the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (MUNI), the Department of Transportation, and Amtrak have had to send out memos to their police officers and security personnel reiterating that photography is not a crime. Given the contradictory messages sent by SAR programs, however, it is not surprising there is confusion among the officers on the street.

There is also evidence that some law enforcement officers are using SAR or SAR-like criteria to abuse their power. Many SAR programs describe photography of security personnel or facilities as a precursor to terrorism and a growing number of cases, such as those in Maryland, Washington, Tennessee, New Jersey, Boston, and Miami, involve police harassment, demands for identification, and even arrests of photographers for taking pictures or video documenting law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties. None of these incidents involved any reasonable links to terrorism or other threats to security. SAR criteria have also been used as a pretext for local law enforcement to check immigration status, and played a precipitating role in the arrest of a political activist in Connecticut.

Lack of Evidence That SAR Policing is Effective in Combating Terrorism. For all the potential impact on the rights and privacy of innocent people, there is little objective evidence that SAR programs are effective in identifying and interdicting acts of terrorism. A 2010 ISE SAR evaluation reportindicated that few of the participating SAR programs studied were able to fully implement the ISE SAR process and share data; several of the SAR programs studied had difficulty in providing statistics on the SARs it received; and the majority of SAR programs could not calculate the number of arrests and investigations resulting from SARs (pages 31-32).

Moreover, other government studies question whether there is any scientific basis for believing that a behavioral detection program can be effective in countering terrorism. A 2008 National Academies of Science National Research Council study funded by DHS found that there is no consensus in the scientific community that behavioral detection systems to identify terrorists could be scientifically validated. Likewise, a 2010 Government Accountability Officereview of the Transportation Security Agency’s behavioral detection system called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), in which Behavioral Detection Officers are purportedly trained to identify threats to aviation by looking for suspicious behavior and appearance, confirmed that no large-scale security screening program based on behavioral indicators has ever been scientifically validated (page 14). GAO noted that while Behavioral Detection Officers had sent over 150,000 travelers to secondary screening there is no evidence the program ever identified a terrorist or other threat to aviation (page 46). Meanwhile, at least 16 individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist plots traveled 23 times through 8 SPOT airports undetected (pages 46-47). Behavioral detection programs like SAR and SPOT, which pose significant threats to civil rights and privacy, must be proven effective before they are implemented or they will simply waste security resources.

My other blog: Justice for Jacqueline and Janessa Greig

September 9th was the fifth anniversary of the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed (murdered) CPUC Gas Ratepayer Advocate Mrs. Jacqueline (Jackie) Greig and her thirteen year old daughter, Janessa. Mrs. Greig was the head of her department and was in charge of approving a 3.6 billion dollar rate increase proposal submitted by PG&E […]

Alan Wang (KGO Reporter) SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — PG&E is waiting to get hit with criminal charges. The federal government is expected to go after the utility for that pipeline disaster in San Bruno more than three years ago. The gas explosion was always a crime in the eyes of Gayle Masuno whose 87-year old […]

Well, I just finished the story about attending the Subcommittee meeting and I must say, it wasn’t easy. It was difficult for several reasons but most of them had to do with me being new to blogging, especially this particular template that you see here. Even though both of my blogs are on WordPress (which […]